Parrish Art Museum

This article was originally published in Domus 965 / January 2013

The Parrish Art Museum by Herzog & de Meuron cuts a strong image: two conjoined pitched roofs extruded to an unusual length, set picturesquely in a field. Approached obliquely along Montauk Highway in Southampton, New York, it appears as a jarring abstraction. It would be hard not to agree with Jacques Herzog that the Parrish is more "in the tradition of landforms" than of contemporary architecture. In fact its straightforward image has led some commentators who have not visited the building to believe that the project is entirely simplistic, and to assume it doesn't merit a second look. The way the Parrish both allows and then overturns superficial first impressions— which certainly happens when it is visited in person — is among its most striking accomplishments. As Herzog has said in conversation, the Parrish initially "appears to be a readymade" — an iconic vernacular form enlisted in the service of architecture.

But Herzog's view is that even if images of the building "raise the question, 'Is it a readymade?'", visiting the building will "provide the answer: 'No, I am not'". In this way the Parrish "questions the overly iconic buildings made for magazines that are just about form". Even more remarkable is that — despite Herzog's scepticism of how architecture meets print — the same overturning of expectations happens through a good look at the building's plans.

Of course approaching a building through media requires a type of detective work, a close reading of photographs, plans, sections, etc., that, for some buildings, is more effort than it's worth — and so it should be no surprise that many people won't try if they aren't properly drawn in. The Parrish does little to provide a transition from the building's overall image to an appreciation of the organisation of its interior spaces. It lacks, for example, the material "hook" of the rubble walls of the Dominus Winery (another long, low box), which draw the magazine reader to the details of the facade and inwards to their consequences for the interior.

This restraint is actually one of the Parrish's best qualities: inside and out, its formal minimalism is brought into relief by a material palette subjected to such precise control that it needs no extra "finish". As a result of this starkness, however, the Parrish is in danger of being understood (wrongly) as a building reducible to a formalist icon, an off-the-shelf barn.

So it would be appropriate to disregard the architects' wishes and try to see the Parrish as a series of design decisions, or even as part of a conversation about architecture and its history. Let's say we decide to design the Parrish as an even simpler extrusion: what if the building had a single pitched roof? There may have been good reason to try such a scheme — indeed there is a napkin sketch of the Parrish suggesting that this was the first impulse. Thinking historically, Colin Rowe noted how, as architecture emerged from orthodox modernism in the middle of the last century, a psychological need apparently arose for large, singular, centralising spaces, such as domes and vaults, to counter the supposedly "neutral" free plan with its field of columns.

Experiments showed, however, that such singular spaces often defy function. In the case of an extrusion — a single linear spatial "cell" — the problems might be a dead-end arrangement of enfiladed galleries, or awkward subdivisions that would violate the gable form. The next thing to try might be a doubling of the roof, creating two adjacent extrusions. This would allow subdivisions into rooms of the right size in the short direction, but it would fail to allow the introduction of circulation in the long direction without stealing space under one gable or the other. At this point in the design of the Parrish, an ingenious move was made: allow the two roofs to overlap in the middle, creating a third bay and an overall A-B-A rhythm in the short direction.

The result is two equal outer bays with a compressed inner corridor, a solution that allows both overall linearity — a central circulation corridor that runs the length of the building — and localised subdivision into rooms of different lengths. It also creates an ambiguity with respect to centrality. Local centres are created at the low point where the gables come together, but these centres are weakened by the pull of space outwards to the taller bays. In this way the Parrish fluctuates between being spatially linear, centralising and peripheral.

The organisation of the Parrish in plan is likewise a clever combination of the singular spatial cell and free-plan plasticity. The space underneath the roof is carved into an alternating series of solids and voids, creating a series of local centres — lobby, galleries, administration. At one point, at the auditorium, the solid mass of enclosure pulls away from the roof, revealing the logical separation of the two formal systems. So perhaps we should understand Herzog's desire to "focus on experience" as a non-dogmatic, promiscuously formalist approach to design. The Parrish does not adhere to a single formal system. Rather, it seems to have been designed as an opportunistic combination of systems. It is linear and centralised and peripheral. It deploys singular spatial cells and free-plan plasticity. It combines a readymade roof and finely crafted spatial episodes underneath.

In practice, a focus on experience is usually code for irregularity, pure and simple. This was a major discovery of the picturesque: buildings resembling a collision of irregular volumes produce pleasing visual variety. The idea is to disallow a Gestalt reading of a strong form that would get in the way of a non-predetermined unfolding of experience. Herzog & de Meuron rely on a more difficult and dangerous strategy: the Parrish Art Museum needs an initial Gestalt reading — the iconic extrusion set in the landscape — in order to subvert it, creating a sense of surprise upon the discovery of an architecture that is not reducible to a simple figure. It is both a strong form and an experience that cannot be understood in these terms alone.

This surprise happens in person, to be sure. But it is doubly surprising to see it happening in a magazine, in a building's plans — and this is where the Parrish really succeeds. Matthew Allen, architect and writer